B
Refine
Document Type
- Article (166)
Keywords
- Artificial intelligence (9)
- Dynamic capabilities (7)
- Business model innovation (5)
- Leveraged buyout (5)
- Private equity (5)
- Systematic literature review (5)
- Entrepreneurship (4)
- Mergers and acquisitions (4)
- Shapley value (4)
- Sharing economy (4)
Institute
- Chair of Strategic Entrepreneurship (37)
- Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer (15)
- Chair of Macroeconomics (15)
- Chair of Accounting and Auditing (13)
- Chair of Mergers & Acquisitions (12)
- Chair of Financial Management (11)
- Chair of Economics and Information Systems (10)
- Chair of Business Psychology and Leadership (9)
- Chair of Marketing and Retail (9)
- Chair of Marketing Management and Sustainability (8)
Braving the elements
(2025)
Cycling is among the healthiest and most sustainable forms of transportation, with the potential to reduce congestion and emissions. However, many cyclists switch to motorized vehicles when temperatures drop, raising questions about promoting winter cycling, an area with limited research. Our study addresses this gap by examining factors influencing winter cycling and intervention strategies. Using stimulus–organism–response theory and a literature review on winter cycling, we surveyed 11,034 Swiss cyclists online. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed four latent factors impacting winter cycling intentions: cycling identity, health consciousness, adverse weather safety concerns, and winter road safety concerns. We also assessed five behavioral interventions aimed at promoting winter cycling: a monetary incentive, social comparison, an additional paid day of holidays per year, a competition, and goal setting. All interventions increased participants’ winter cycling intentions, with the paid day off being the most effective and social comparison the least effective. Further moderation analyses revealed that adverse weather safety concerns moderate the link between the interventions and winter cycling intentions. This research contributes to the transportation literature by providing new insights into the psychological factors facilitating active transport behavior under adverse conditions. This study offers guidance for policy-makers and practitioners interested in promoting sustainable mobility, specifically, winter cycling.
Diese Studie untersucht die steigende Relevanz von LinkedIn als Kanal für die strategische Kapitalmarktkommunikation von CEOs börsennotierter Unternehmen im DAX40. Angesichts wachsender Transparenzanforderungen und Stakeholder-Erwartungen bietet LinkedIn ein beruflich orientiertes soziales Netzwerk, um gezielt mit kapitalmarktorientierten Stakeholder-Gruppen in einen direkten Dialog zu treten. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, wie CEOs börsennotierter Unternehmen LinkedIn nutzen, um mit Investoren, Mitarbeitern, Kunden und der breiten Öffentlichkeit gezielt zu interagieren. Basierend auf einer einjährigen Analyse des Posting-Verhaltens und der Inhalte wurden Chancen und Risiken sowie Best Practices der Kapitalmarktkommunikation von CEOs auf LinkedIn herausgearbeitet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass eine starke Präsenz auf LinkedIn die Beziehungen zu Stakeholdern erheblich stärken kann – vorausgesetzt, CEOs kommunizieren authentisch, konsistent und adressatengerecht.
Purpose
The concept of resilience has garnered significant attention during recent global crises. Family businesses are often highlighted for their inherent resilience, attributed to their distinctive characteristics, orientation, goals and familial influence. Nonetheless, a coherent body of research on strategies for family business resilience uncovering managerial implications remains elusive.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors performed a systematic literature review followed by a synthesis and inductive analysis of 57 selected articles to identify strategies that strengthen family business resilience.
Findings
The findings reveal strategic approaches shaped by a strong commitment to family-centric culture, identity and values and extensive internal and external relationships. These strategies, which are significantly influenced by family businesses’ distinctive traits, are critical in enhancing a family business’s adaptability and crisis response. Nonfinancial goals, a long-term orientation and risk-aware financial standing further enhance resilience by collectively enabling businesses to navigate external adversities resiliently and secure their enduring viability.
Originality/value
The paper concludes with a cohesive and dynamic framework that integrates the various strategic approaches into a novel conceptualization and points towards future research directions.
Innovating beyond boundaries
(2025)
This article analyses how firms enhance their dynamic capabilities through open innovation activities. While previous research has acknowledged the potential of integrating dynamic capabilities and open innovation, existing studies are fragmented in that they neither build upon one another nor offer a comprehensive framework. Instead, they often focus on isolated aspects of dynamic capabilities, resulting in disparate, incoherent insights. This fragmentation hinders the development of actionable insights for organizations aiming to systematically enhance their innovation processes through open innovation. To address this issue, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify key dimensions that link open innovation activities to the sensing, seizing and transforming phases-the core components of dynamic capabilities. The resulting framework offers an integrative perspective that goes beyond fragmented research findings and provides a structured approach to operationalizing open innovation. The framework transitions open innovation from an abstract concept to a practical tool that can be systematically embedded into firms' innovation processes. Additionally, by situating dynamic capabilities within the context of innovation management, the framework expands their theoretical and practical utility. This study provides actionable insights for practitioners and establishes a consolidated foundation for future research, thus enhancing the theoretical and practical impacts of open innovation.
Organizational agility (OA), the ability of an organization to adapt to rapidly changing environments and reconfigure its structure and operations, has become a critical capability for achieving and sustaining competitive advantage. However, existing frameworks for OA often adopt narrow, industry-specific perspectives, neglecting the broader interplay of contextual factors, internal and external antecedents, and multidimensional capabilities. This study addresses this gap by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) of 110 peer-reviewed articles from three leading academic databases. Guided by an inductive approach and the grounded theory methodology, this research identifies and categorizes the key antecedents of OA into four interconnected dimensions: contextual factors, fundamental attributes, vital enablers, and dynamic capabilities. The findings reconceptualize OA as a bundle of interrelated dynamic capabilities—encompassing macro-agility (e.g., strategic and partnering agility) and micro-agility (e.g., operational, innovation, and workforce agility)—rather than a singular construct. This multidimensional concept bridges theoretical gaps, integrating insights from contingency, agency and resource-based theories to explain the dynamic relationship between internal and external antecedents. The study offers a foundation for future research and provides actionable guidance for practitioners seeking to design agile organizations capable of thriving in dynamic capabilities.
Defining the deal value in mergers and acquisitions is inherently complex and often constitutes an inflection point for the parties involved. By paying part of the deal value at a later stage according to predefined goals, earnouts are intended to alleviate information asymmetries and help bridge valuation differences. Despite their wide application in practice, research on earnouts remains fragmented. This study presents the first systematic literature review of earnouts, mapping the scattered research landscape by analyzing 64 papers published between 1970 and 2023. The review categorizes the body of earnout research into three distinct streams: the motives for employing earnouts, their implications, and the nuances of their contractual arrangements. Based on this synthesis, research gaps are identified that present a comprehensive road map for future research. This study enables investors to employ earnouts more successfully and guides scholars to pursue further earnout research based on its holistic overview.
Do good and talk about it
(2025)
This study provides robust evidence that higher investor relations (IR) quality goes in tandem with enhanced ESG ratings. Building on the extensive data from an established investor relations award in Germany, covering the largest listed firms between 2014 and 2022, we use both panel-data and two-stage least-squares regressions to analyze the effect of IR quality on ESG ratings. Our results hold true for various robustness checks. Moreover, not only do our results introduce a suitable measure for IR quality, but they also demonstrate the relevance of IR quality as an additional determinant of ESG performance measured by rating agencies. Finally, our results provide practical guidelines to firms struggling with their ESG ratings by providing reasoning that investing in higher IR quality eventually meets with success.
Earnout deals are expected to protect acquirers from overpayment as information asymmetries are reduced and the final purchase price is partly based on the future performance of the target. Various scholars have investigated the perception of earnout deals by capital markets revealing significant abnormal returns. Those studies are focused mostly on the Anglo-Saxon countries and China leveraging a pre-COVID datasets. Hence, this study aims at investigating capital market reaction to earnout deals in Continental Europe covering the timeline of 2012 to 2022. Our results indicate that earnout deals in Continental Europe outperform non-earnout deals and are especially beneficial in times of high uncertainty.
This paper investigates the emerging potential of metaverse technology and the diverse opportunities it presents for companies across industries. Although the metaverse remains in its nascent stages, its swift evolution has introduced a broad spectrum of use cases that hold significant promise for businesses. However, despite the evident potential, there remains a limited understanding of how metaverse technology can be effectively applied to benefit business operations and strategy. To address this gap, this study employs a scoping review methodology, systematically collecting and analyzing data from academic literature, publicly available sources, and company websites. The comprehensive review identified 101 distinct use cases of metaverse technology, which were subsequently categorized into three primary application fields: developing new product and service offerings, enhancing customer experience, and optimizing internal business processes. These findings not only provide a compelling rationale for companies contemplating the adoption of metaverse technology but also represent the first extensive exploration of its applications across diverse fields and industries. The study offers valuable insights that are crucial for both academic researchers and business practitioners who are keen to understand and leverage the transformative potential of the metaverse. By mapping out the current landscape of metaverse applications, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how companies can harness this technology to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, and create new value propositions in an increasingly immersive and interconnected world.
Sustainability performance (SP) has emerged as a central topic on both corporate and political agendas worldwide. This study investigated the relationship between SP and financial distress risk (FDR) among European listed firms, addressing the growing importance of SP in financial decision-making. Utilising a panel dataset from LSEG Data & Analytics (formerly Refinitiv) for STOXX Europe 600 firms between 2016 and 2022, we performed regression analyses to examine the impact of SP on FDR, measured through alternating scores. In contrast to most existing research, we found SP to increase FDR for most analyses performed, with the effect varying by SP dimension. Because we found environmental and governance SP to increase FDR, we did not find an association between social SP and FDR in most analyses performed. Our findings provide practical and theoretical implications for firms, investors and policymakers concerning the influence of SP investments on FDR and potential SP overinvestments in Europe's latest sustainability regulatory setting.